Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Tina Turner

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If anyone can offer tips to increase the humor content, let me know. Also, I'd like to add a list of significant court cases to the profile; so far I have added one to provide continuity with the article I wrote on Tiny tim. This article also begs for pages on Kathleen Turner, her former brother-in-law Ike Turner, a write-up about the planet West Virginia, and a serious update on the Dolly Parton page. I plan on writing an entry for the legal case "Snickerton v. Country Joe" which will exempt literal damaged caused by a recording from the Tiny Tim ruling. Damn, I take this way too seriously.
--GungaD 02:46, January 14, 2011 (UTC)

Ok, what you've got here is an article with some decent ideas in it, but that really needs a lot more work. The biggest problem is that it suffers from randomness. Let me give some examples; first of all there's the part about robots from the planet West Virginia. The thing about randomness like this is that it comes suddenly out of nowhere, which only makes it seem out of place. Writing like this feels lazy because it lacks consistency, you can't just throw any zany idea you have into an article because you'll end up with a big silly mess. Sometimes being downright bizarre can work, but you have to be consistent and you also have to do something original. Check this article out for a decent example of how you can be "out there" and still funny. Note how consistent and original it is. But generally, a more realistic approach is funnier. What you could say instead of the aliens joke is something like; "until they built robots to do the job instead of him, and do it for considerably less pay". While not a hilarious example, I hope this illustrates my point. This is funnier because it's something that could really happen, lots of people who do menial jobs are made redundant when technology improves, so this line is actually satirical in a way, and it doesn't have the alienating effect that sudden, style-breaking silliness does. It's also rather unbelievable, I mean, obviously we're not expecting you to write wholly truthful articles, but if it doesn't have some bearing on reality people won't be able to enjoy it. I mean, aliens coming down and stealing people's jobs? Nobody is going to buy that, just like no one is going to buy the idea that Turner is actually a lawyer, but I'll talk more about that in the concept section.

Nonsense is rarely funny, obviously you can do it if you're going to be consistent about it, but generally speaking I would advise against it. Take the random "namedropping", for example, where you say Turner worshipped Jesus, Buddha, Santa, Morgan Freeman, ad nauseum. The reason it isn't funny, in my opinion, is that it's not playing on the reader's expectations of who Tina Turner is. It's all irrelevant, really. Those names you're listing could be anyone, it could be absolutely anyone at all and it wouldn't be any more or less funny than it is now. Any joke you can easily substitute for something entirely different should be avoided. What doesn't help is that all these names are dripping with cliché, we hear them all the time on this site; you may as well have said Chuck Norris. That's how overdone they are.

So after lots of randomness and irrelevancy, you end the article on several lists. Lists are another common pitfall for noob articles, so don't worry too much about falling into it; we all do at some point. Our guide to writing for the site strongly advises against them, so it may be worth reading that (it can surely explain it much better than I can). But personally, the reason I hate lists is because they don't ever get to grips with the jokes they're telling. They skirt over them too quickly and tend not to have any flow at all, which makes them look rushed. Don't feel too bad about it, pretty much every article on a musician falls into the same trap of the "silly discography". The problem is, it's been done a zillion times before, and wasn't really that funny to begin with. Do you know what would be better? Expansive sections of prose about the songs/albums and what's funny about them, much like this article on the greatest female songwriter ever does. I would also recommend against sections like this in general, they're little more than "trivia" sections really, which as its name suggests, is trivial. Incorporate things like this into the main body of the text instead. It will flow much better, and things are always funnier when the flow doesn't break; the reader will be dragged along by good prose. They will get more into it and will ultimately laugh more. The best laughs are primal; you can't control them, your job as a writer is to immerse the reader to the point where he or she can't help but laugh. Lists cannot do this... usually.

It's not all random, however, you do take the time to make some proper jokes which are actually about Tina Turner - the one about the loudness of her voice, for instance. This is much better in terms of the style of the humour, because it can't be substituted for anything else. Tina Turner has a big voice, everybody knows that, so it's a good joke to make. In regards to the wording you can probably do a little better. The only advice I really have here is to not just state things explicitly. All you're really saying is, stripped down; "her voice is loud". That's not hugely funny, although true, because everyone knows it. You have to find an interesting way to say it. Other options would be to try a comparison, (ie. "louder than a Michael Bay movie about thunder") or a humorous consequence (ie. "so loud it has been known to cause landslides... on Pluto"). Again, not hilarious, but my point is you have to take the reader down a path they're not expecting.

Concept:

4

The real issue here is that the article flits all over the place, never settling on a single style or concept. Despite reading it a few times, I still have no idea who or what you want me to think Tina Turner is. One minute she's a lawyer,

the next her character from Mad Max, then she's this "Auntie Entity" character (huh?). Only for a few sentences is she truly a singer. Let's look at the Charlie and the Chocolate factory part first; this really has nothing to do with Tina Turner. This is infuriating for a reader, to look up an article on Tina Tuner only to find there's barely anything in here about her. It's just lazy writing really, and I'm sorry to have to say that. It's not that I think you're a bad writer, far from it in fact, it's just that I don't feel you've put all the effort into this that you could. It could do with a little more work, basically. Anyway, back to the section - if nothing interesting or funny happened in her real childhood, just don't mention it, you don't have to make things up, and if you do; make it believable, make it relevant. Perhaps try reading the Wiki article on her, see if anything worth mentioning did happen in her childhood? As for the sections on her later life, the law career is pretty silly too. She never had one, she had a music career, there's no reason to talk about this at all, it isn't funny, it doesn't even satirise anything (not music, not the law, not anything). The only motivation I can see here is "wouldn't it be crazy if she were a lawyer?" Well, yes it would. But anyone can write stuff like this, there's no skill to it. I could write an article about how JRR Tolkien was a stripper, or one where Roland Emmerich is a film director - and it would have no more merit than this. I'm not trying to be cruel here, I'm just trying to show you how the idea simply doesn't work. Get rid of all the lawyer stuff, trust me, you'll be better off. Same with all the Mad Max stuff - this time it's relevant(ish), but it's still incredibly silly and random, and is again filled with clichés like Carrot Top and Rickrolling. If the concept was something like "all of Tina's films were actually real" it might work, but that would be a silly concept, especially for someone who is primarily a singer.

So what to do? Basically, you need to think of a funny characterisation of Turner. Biographical articles tend to work best with a running gag based on one popular conception of the celebrity. So for instance, the Keanu Reeves article plays off how spaced-out the actor always seems. I don't know a whole lot about Tina Turner, so it's difficult for me to suggest exactly what to do here, but you seem to be edging towards some good ideas anyway. You mention her legs quite a bit, is this something she's particularly notable for? It put me in mind of another article, in fact. This may give you some ideas, as it does something similar in the way it deconstructs a female singer's body down to just one famous appendage. Apart from that, I suppose a running gag about her voice might be good? The article on Kate Bush, which I've already linked to, also does something like that. Read up on a few other articles on famous people and see what they do, particularly featured ones (as apparently they represent our best work). They will hopefully give you more ideas on how to approach this. The only other thing to remember is to keep it consistent.

Prose and formatting:

7

For the most part, your prose is ok. I can tell you're actually a good writer, I guess it's mostly your concept and ideas that need work. This gives me hope that you can do it though. There are a couple of spelling errors here and there, probably just typos, so I would recommend you give it a good old fashioned proofread at some point (even if you just use a spellchecker). The only one I can remember right now is where you say "review" instead of "revue".

Then, the only issue that springs to mind in terms of prose is the part where it randomly becomes first-person, despite the tone being encyclopaedic for the most part. Like with the concept, you've got to keep things like this consistent or it looks sloppy.

Images:

2

Well, there's only one and it's not particularly funny, so not many points here I'm afraid. You need a lot more. I always think articles look best when there's pictures all the way down. Again, I would recommend you just have a look at some of our featured articles to see how they're illustrated. In terms of captions, stick to my advice in humour, keep them consistent and believable like the rest of your jokes.

Miscellaneous:

6

My gut feeling.

Final Score:

24

So while quite a bit more work is needed here, you're definitely off to a decent start. Key things to work on are the randomness in the humour and the lack of proper characterisation of your subject. Do this, and you should be on your way to comic success in no time (well, as much success as there can be on a wiki). If there's anything I've said here that you want me to explain better, or if you want my opinion on anything I might have missed, please let me know and I'll try to help. I hope the review is ok.